From the course: Introduction to Career Skills in Data Analytics

Data workers

From the course: Introduction to Career Skills in Data Analytics

Data workers

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- If you use spreadsheets every day and you create valuable insights for people through various presentations or reporting, you are a data worker. But you're not likely called that by your job title. You may have a job title that represents a department or the people you support, but you're not titled data worker. You just are one. I would also consider you a data worker if you find yourself exporting data out of systems, building some form of report or presentation weekly or monthly. You may also receive data from someone in another department, like IT, who has access to more data than you. You may frequently visit the company's data warehouse, or data system, to gain information for your reporting purposes. Data workers also work with functions and do some aggregate functions with the data. You may use some logical functions like an if. You're able to search for functions and find the ones that are relevant to your data work, you are likely a data worker. I believe that there are far more data workers than our organization realize, and if you're in this role, guess what? You're a great resource. And one of the first places an organization can turn to, to upscale and data. If you're looking for areas of growth, then make sure you're using tools in Excel like Power Query and other analysis techniques like PivotTables and basic visualizations. If you have more than average skill with these, you might be more than a data worker already. You can also build skills like PowerPoint because this is another way we visualize data for meetings and presentations. Documentation is a critical competency for any data role, so being a wizard at Microsoft Word doesn't hurt. Remember, like every other tool, it's powerful and often because we use it every day, we don't believe we need to explore training. Trust me, you should. For the soft skills, you'll want to focus on effective presentations and communication skills. Having these skills make you more than suitable for roles that require advanced skills in Excel and doing basic analysis.

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